Modifying Alert Templates AFTER the alert has been created

I have created an alert for some 40 members of our company. I was using a custom alert template, but it seems that the subject line of the alert email is less-than-helpful to our users (along the lines of "732 has been changed").

I know I can edit an alert template with the drop-down on the alert, but does that change that single instance of the alert, or does it modify the template for all users?

I would truly hate to have to modify ~40 alerts manually...

(and the reason I had to create 40 copies of the same alert was that SharePoint doesn't deal well (or at all) with nested AD groups -- this is an area that SharePoint Solutions could certainly help we lowly Sys Admins, either with enhancements to Alert Manager, or, if necessary, a separate product!)

Can you verify/grant temporary access to the following accounts to see if it is a permission error pertaining to a SharePoint resource?

Make your account a Site Collection Administrators. From your previous message is sounds like your account is only an 'Owner' and you have a site collection created at the root of the web application. A Site Collection Administrator has more permissions than a site owner.

Make your account a Farm Administrator.

Make your Application Pool Identity a Farm Administrator.

Please be sure to perform an IISRESET after each modification to remove any cached permissions. If you still have the issue we can probably rule out any permissions issues to a SharePoint resource. We can then turn our attention to file/database resources.